Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

insisting on travelling round the world’s mathematics departments, never staying in any place for more than a few months, carrying all his worldly possessions with him in his suitcase. He managed this extraordinary and perhaps unique achievement by a private citizen at the height of the Cold War, thanks to the unanimous support of the international mafia of mathematicians. When, unable to talk number theory with him, I asked him, on an agreeable evening in Cambridge, why he wanted the permanent right to go back to Budapest, he said: ‘Is good mathematical atmosphere.’ Hungary, of course, was the only part of central Europe that had not lost most of its Jews.

In some countries of ‘real socialism’, as for instance Poland, it was possible to avoid the Party in one’s dealings with colleagues and friends. Not so in the German Democratic Republic where nothing was outside its supervision, certainly not the contacts of its citizens with foreign communists. Moreover, there was no scope for dissidence there or even doubt about the line that came down from the commanding heights. In some ways, and not least for linguistic reasons, I therefore found it easiest to discover there what Party membership meant under socialism.

East German communists, at least those within my knowledge, were and most remained believers, whether old KPD cadres from before 1933; youthful enthusiasts who joined in the ruined landscape of 1945 to build a new future, such as Fritz Klein, son of the editor-in-chief of one of the Weimar Republic’s most respected Conservative newspapers; second-generation communists such as my friend Siegfried Bunger, son of a worker from rural Mecklenburg; or Gerhard Schilfert, converted as a Soviet prisoner-of war, a man incapable of being other than sincerely convinced by and loyal to authority, old or new. (All these were historians.) In a way, they selected themselves. Those who could not stand the heat got out of the kitchen, which was really quite easy until the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

I had little direct contact with the Old Guard, except with the Kuczynskis and, through my friend the painter Georg Eisler, with his admired father Hanns, partner of Brecht and official state composer of the GDR, whom I met in the unproletarian ambiance of the Waldorf Hotel. Hanns had abandoned his wife and son, whose exile had taken them from Vienna via Moscow and Manchester back to Vienna. A more recent wife, Lou, he lost to another communist veteran from Moscow, the brilliant and romantic charmer Ernst Fischer, son of a Habsburg general and postwar star of Austrian culture and the Austrian CP until it expelled him after the Prague Spring. I owe an intellectual debt to Fischer, acknowledged in my Age of Revolution. All remained in friendly contact, as Fischer did with his first wife, a handsome aristocratic girl from Bohemia who became a Soviet agent, whose revolutionary credentials went back to the German communist insurrection of 1921. The Leipzig- Viennese Eislers were almost the quintessential Comintern family. Aunt Elfriede (known to history as Ruth Fischer) had been the young communist believer in free love who moved Lenin to his criticism of casual sex (‘the glass of water theory’). Some years later, she emerged as part of the ultra-left leadership of the KPD before disappearing into expulsion and exile having picked the wrong side in Soviet and Comintern politics. She reappeared after the war in the USA, among other things as a denouncer of her brother Gerhart Eisler. He, also a defeated (but more moderate) leader of the KPD, had become a Comintern agent of importance in China, the USA and elsewhere. He was expelled from the USA, jumping ship en route in Britain, and returned to East Germany where, during the mania of late Stalinism, he was – or so it is claimed – cast as a potential and no doubt in due course self-confessed traitor in a show trial. Fortunately the East German regime, though occupied by the Soviet forces, never joined this murderous Stalinist fashion, though it is rarely given credit for such restraint. Gerhart Eisler spent the rest of his life in politically minor jobs in the GD R, such as head of the broadcasting services, gently fending off his nephew’s questions about his past. Had he written his memoirs, which he refused to do, they would have been as meaningless as those of most diplomats: his generation did not talk. Hollywood, where he spent his exile, suited Hanns, the musician, fat, witty, cynical, and far better at succeeding there than his partner Brecht, but he went back none the less and wrote the new state’s national anthem. One can hardly accuse them of having many illusions about the reality of Comintern communism, the USSR and least of all the GDR. They stayed, controlled and harassed by a rigid political hierarchy to whom they were from time to time denounced by rivals and ambitious juniors, constantly watched, even as they were publicly honoured, by the largest permanent policing system ever operated in a modern state, the Stasi. But they stayed.

In one way the peculiar situation of the GDR made it easier. The East German regime suffered from the patent fact that it had no legitimacy, initially almost no support, and would have never in its lifetime won a freely contested election. The successor to the SED (Socialist Unity Party) has probably more genuine popular support today than when the old regime totted up the habitual 98 per cent of votes. To this extent East German communists were still, speaking globally, in embattled opposition, especially under the threat and temptation of their overpowering neighbour, the vastly larger Federal Republic. This justified measures which would otherwise have horrified communists, even allowing for their Party’s rejection of liberal democracy. One remembers Brecht’s bitter wisecrack about government dissolving the people and electing another. On that very occasion, 17 June 1953, my friend Fritz Klein, a devoted communist of twenty-nine, supported the Soviet intervention after the great workers’ revolt, because he thought the regime socially more just and politically more reliably anti-fascist than the Federal Republic. Similarly, in 1961 he supported the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘My view then,’ he writes, ‘was that it had to be accepted as the lesser evil, faced with the inevitable alternative: to abandon the still legitimate experiment of building a new society.’¹⁰ The most they could hope for was that the socialist society they were constructing would work and eventually win over the people. Without doubt the best and most intelligent East German Party members were both critics of the system and remained hopeful reformers to the end. But they were powerless. It was, of course, easier for Party members to abdicate their judgement and play it by the book (that is, at the top, ask for advice from Moscow) or simply do whatever the Party told them had to be done. And the Party was run by old hardliners from before 1933 or their successors of the next generation.

The passions of the Cold War have presented the East European regimes as gigantic systems of terror and gulags. In fact, after the years of blood and iron under Stalin (who was in two minds whether he wanted a GDR at all), the GDR’s system of justice and repression, leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall, has been well described authoritatively by a Harvard historian as ‘continuously shabby but relatively unsanguinary’.¹¹ It was a monstrous all-embracing bureaucracy which did not terrorize but rather constantly chivvied, rewarded and punished its subjects. The new society they were building was not a bad society: work and careers for all, universal education open at all levels, health, social security and pensions, holidays in a firmly structured community of good people doing a honest day’s work, the best of high culture accessible to the people, open-air leisure and sports, no class distinctions. At its best it settled down into – Charles Maier’s words again – something between ‘socialism and Gemutlichkeit’, or a ‘Biedermeier collectivism’.¹² The drawback, apart from the fact, unconcealable from its citizens, that it was far worse off than West Germany, was that it was imposed on its citizens by a system of superior authority, as by strict nineteenth-century parents on recalcitrant or at least unwilling minors. They had no control over their lives. They were not free. Since West German television was generally accessible the constant presence of compulsion and censorship was evident and resented. Nevertheless, as long as it looked permanent, it was tolerable enough.

All this affected Party members as much as, perhaps more than, the rest. Their conversations were not only recorded by rivals or the omnipresent Stasi informers, but, if deemed unacceptable, brought demands for public self-criticism or demotion by dour but unconvincing functionaries from the self-contained ghetto of the national rulers, rigidly laying down the line. Dissidents were worried rather than harried into conformity. In the worst cases, they were nagged or extruded to the West, like Wolf Biermann, whom I remember visiting with Georg Eisler, in his room in a back court of East Berlin where he sang the protest songs that had already made him famous.

Most Party members in the GDR, and almost certainly most Party intellectuals, believed in some kind of socialism to the end. It is hard to find among them, as among Soviet emigrants, reform communists who had become 100 per cent pro-American cold warriors. But they were increasingly downhearted. When did communists begin to suspect – or to believe – that the ‘really existing’ socialist economy, clearly inferior to the capitalist one, was not working at all?